She looked abroad into the world, and saw no need of her. She shrank, indeed, from any actual step, notwithstanding her dreams and her conviction that something great ought to come of her; and if she had attempted to take any step whatever, she knew that the Duke and the Duchess, and Hungerford and Susan, and all the connections and retainers to the hundredth degree, would have rushed with dismay to prevent her. Was it possible that by sitting calmly upon her elevated seat, and smiling sweetly or frowning (as best she could) as the occasion required, she was doing all she was called upon to do? In that case Lady Jane acknowledged to herself with a sigh, that it was scarcely worth while being a princess royal at all. The reader will think it strange that all this time no idea of marriage, or of the great preliminary of marriage, had entered her head. Perhaps it would be rash to say that this was the case. But she had known from an early period that there were very few people in the world who could pretend to Lady Jane Altamont’s hand. She laughed when it was proposed to her to marry the Marquis of Wodensville. “Oh no, papa, thank you,” she said. “We have made alliances with his family before now. He has some of the best blood in England in his veins,” said the Duke. “Oh no, papa, thank you,” said Lady Jane. She did not ask any one’s advice on this point. When there was that negotiation with Mr Roundel, of Bishop’s Roundel, she was more interested, but not enough to disturb her equilibrium when it was found he had gone off in disgust, and married his sister’s governess. “I thought he could not be pure blood,” the Duke said. Lady Jane smiled, and, it is to be feared, thought so too. The worst of high rank is that it destroys perspective. She could not see the gradations below her in the least. She knew the difference between her father’s rank and that of a prince of the blood; and she knew exactly how countesses and marchionesses ought to go in to dinner; but of the difference between governesses and housekeepers and other attendants she knew little. The one and the other were entirely out of her sphere. Her own old governess, whose name was Strangford, she had always called Stranghy and been extremely fond of--but then she was fond of all her old attendants, and thought of them much in the same way. Then Lord Rushbrook, who was a Cabinet Minister, had presented himself to her. She did not wish to marry him, but she felt that here was something which was not rank (for he was only a baron), and yet was equal to rank. It was almost the first gleam of such enlightenment that came into her mind.